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“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” (Carl Rogers)

Saturday, 10 January 2015

Simon Schama's Power of Art

I spent the last week doped up and knackered on penicillin as a result of getting myself falling-over Thanatos drunk before Festivus. However, especially given this is the second dose, I realised that I would be semi-comatose and hinged the week around Simon Shama's Power of Art. I'm so glad that I did. Simon is an effervescent, eloquent and perceptive commentator and his presence is always authentic. The format is to hone in on a single artist and a single work, but building up such informative context that the chosen artist/work is slowly revealed to us as epiphany - just brilliant. Simon presents the following artists/works, the words are mine based on his...

Caravaggio – David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1610)

The killer Caravaggio

Stalks the streets

With dagger, sword and brush

He is suspended

Into our own murderous age

Repenting even to us

Bernini – Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1657)

O Cavaliere

To find a look of pain

You burnt your own body

And did the very same

Slashing the face of your lover

Saint Teresa in ecstasy

Rembrandt – The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis (1662)

On the banks of the Rhine

Where craft meets imagination

In the flame of an idea

Perfect finish abandoned

For rough freedom seen
Through one blind eye

David – The Death of Marat (1793)

The liar-in-chief

Glamourised the Terror

As classical martyr

Art propaganda

As lethal beauty

Bathed in light

Turner – The Slave Ship (1840)

As English as a cup of tea,

Our own odd-man-out

Released storms, plagues, destruction

The first chaos of the world
Indistinct and glorious
In a sublime blood red sunset

Van Gogh – Wheatfield with Crows (1890)

The preacher-painter-poet

Lived the life of the mind

Rebellious, opening hearts

In a drama of blue and yellow

Blood red, blue-green,

The infernal furnace of pale sulphur

Picasso – Guernica (1937)

Sailing through chaos and hatred,
Riot and revolution
Far from the barricades
Bombs made cubes of a town
Hectic, terrifying, screaming
And stopping us dead

Rothko – Black on Maroon (1958)

“You must realize that twenty years ago we felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing – flowers, reclining nudes and people playing the cello." (Barnett Newman)

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief... (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)